AI Supports Displaced Peoples, Refugees in Ukraine and Beyond

Impressive depth of applications.  Good examples to consider for the future. 

AI Supports Displaced Peoples, Refugees in Ukraine and Beyond

By Karen Emslie

Commissioned by CACM Staff, September 15, 2022

The United Nations (U.N.) reported in May there were around 7.7 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Ukraine, people who have been forced to leave their homes but who remain in the country. Meanwhile, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency) recorded over 5.9 million Ukrainian refugees who have fled their country to locations across Europe.

The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine is part of a global situation in which over 89 million people worldwide were found to be "forcibly displaced" due to persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations at the end of 2021, according to UNHCR.

Displaced peoples and refugees face a multitude of difficulties, from poor living conditions and loss of identity documents to longer-term resettlement, discrimination, and employability issues. Researchers and technology companies have been working with relief organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and governments to develop solutions, some of which are based upon artificial intelligence (AI), to support IDPs and refugees worldwide.

Ukraine: Responding to the immediate crisis

Palo Alto, CA-based Orbital Insight is using AI and geospatial data to monitor the movements of displaced peoples and refugees in Ukraine. The observations support agencies involved in the relief effort— including the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAid)—to deploy aid and emergency resources where and when they are needed.

Orbital Insight operates a cloud-based platform that uses data including vehicle,  foot-traffic, and land-use observations to provide insights on global economic, societal, and environmental trends. Its clients typically come from sectors like defense and intelligence, energy, and financial services.

The platform's raw data is obtained from multiple sources. It includes high-resolution electro-optical (EO) satellite imagery (which includes information from beyond the visible spectrum) supplied by satellite manufacturer and operator Satellogic, as well as data from connected vehicle sensors and anonymized geolocation sensors on mobile devices. Customized algorithms are used to analyze the data and perform specific tasks, like computer vision-based classification and object detection.

When war broke out in Ukraine, Orbital Insight CEO Kevin O'Brien and his team adapted the platform's capabilities to the conflict. Foot-traffic algorithms, for example, can track the volume, direction, and speed of displaced peoples' movements. The company's analysis showed how foot traffic dropped off dramatically in eastern Ukraine as people fled intense fighting in the region—  and how it then grew in cities in the west of the country as displaced peoples moved to those safer areas.

Such insights support humanitarian organizations' decision-making, such as whether emergency shelters and food should be redeployed to areas that people are moving towards. "Some of the first use-cases were to help manage relief resources both in Ukraine and at border locations," explained O'Brien. "The next was safe exit, safe passage: how do you get people further away from the fighting?"

Satellite imagery gives an aerial view of the situation at borders as refugees cross into neighboring countries like Poland and Moldova. Computer vision provides further insights by automatically counting the number of vehicles at border crossings. The results can be downloaded as geoJSON files, loaded onto a Geographic Information System (GIS), and visualized on maps for further analysis by relief organizations.

Alongside contracts with governmental agencies, Orbital Insight donates analytics via the Data Partnership, a collaborative platform that allows tech companies to share data with international development organizations for research and humanitarian purposes. The company also works directly with partners in Ukraine, including with Reface, a Kyiv-based AI startup that developed a popular face-swapping app and content creation platform. Reface has redirected its focus towards the conflict via numerous initiatives, including developing algorithms to identify Russian troops in satellite imagery and using data to fight disinformation.  ...   (more detail) 

Karen Emslie is a location-independent freelance journalist and essayist. 

GIS Data for Covid Vaccination Distribution

 Off to get my Covid vaccination this morning and saw this:

How GIS Data Can Help Fix Vaccine Distribution in Information Week

Esri Chief Medical Officer Este Geraghty explains how geographic data and maps can streamline COVID-19 vaccine distribution planning.

Chances are you know someone who has received a COVID-19 vaccine. About one in 10 Americans have been vaccinated so far. But as 50 states with 50 different plans scramble to get their populations vaccinated against the novel coronavirus, the race is on for the US to get to a point where all the people who want a shot get a shot.

Any effort of this magnitude is bound to run into logistical and execution challenges along the way. How do you allocate the correct number of doses to each state and to each facility delivering vaccines? How many workers do you need to administer the shots? How far do people have to travel to receive shots?

Another necessary factor that complicates vaccine delivery is that the US is phasing its approach, vaccinating healthcare workers and essential employees and older citizens first. Vaccines are being administered at veterans’ services centers, state sites, hospitals, and many other venues. The government is working to establish a retail pharmacy vaccination program. It's a complex delivery system.  ... "

GIS and Big Data

We were early users of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) when we helped manage Alberta Pine forests.   True it predated 'Big Data', but emerged at about the same time as optimization analytics, which we used to great value.  Nice to see a piece to that see how its still valued and is evolving.

Benefits of Pairing Big Data with GIS Technology

GIS technology is driving the discovery of big data.
by Rehan Ijaz  via Gib Bassett  in SmartDataCollective

GIS is a remarkable technology that has changed our world in unimaginable ways. Its roots can be traced back to 1962, when Roger Tomlinson invented this breakthrough technology for the Canada Land Inventory, which means that GIS predates big data by about 50 years.

Nevertheless, big data is having a tremendous impact on future of GIS. The relationship is a two-way street, because GIS technology is driving the discovery of big data as well.

Here are some of the fascinating ways that big data and GIS technology are playing off of each other

Tapping customer demographic information for market growth

Every brand needs to understand the demographics of its customers. Before the advent of big data, companies were forced to make educated guesses about their clientele.

Portland State University has found that GIS is the future of small business marketing. Local businesses can collect data on customers in their region. This data can be incorporated into heat maps, so that they can formulate a better marketing strategy. They can even break their data down by neighborhood, so they can target their advertisements to each neighborhood based on whether or not customer is living there meet their customer profile. .... " 

Pitney Bowes Location Intelligence

Back in the enterprise we used the Mapinfo GIS system for location and mapping.    They were acquired by Pitney Bowes.  Now that location intelligence system is used by GE in its Predix platform.  The Mapinfo Pro systems still exist.  This is a useful integration of GIS and location analytics.  They write:

" ... What is Location Intelligence?
Location Intelligence is the capability to understand complex relationships between location and data in order to drive better business decisions. It enables organizations to derive meaningful insight by harnessing the power of location to solve business problems, deliver location-based services or manage assets. ... "

Limitations of Geospatial Analytics

In Datamag:   Really some very classic issues about the limitations of long term forecasting in general.  

" ... From a statistical analysis standpoint, modeling natural disasters as black swan risk-mitigation scenarios is better than modeling them as events that can be predicted, much less averted, with any degree of actionable precision. For example, earthquakes remain the classic example of these kinds of catastrophes: they can’t be predicted with confidence, but their impact can be mitigated through various proactive measures. That risk profile also describes the threats that regions face from many meteorological events. In such scenarios, impacted regions are often little more than sitting ducks whose best hope is to mitigate the severity of the inevitable effects. ... " 

Reinventing Supply Chains

From Bain:  Reinventing.  Something we did every few years, and quite successfully.   Most recently just a few years ago.   Here are two public examples:  A Data visualization optimization aided simulation model, with gaming elements.   And an agent based simulation model.  The winning strategy was always to link analytical methods as closely as possible to the decisions involved.  Here an interview with Bain's Adam Borchert. on their take.

Microsoft's Power BI for Office

It has been some time since I looked at any of Microsoft's Business Intelligence offerings.  As MS partners in the enterprise we did see some of their BI acquisitions that work with Access.   New writeup in Nextweb which overviews some of their updates.  One aspect, 3D visualization, in my opinion is only useful for very specialized applications that overlay data atop 3D objects.  As I said previously, I much like their improvements made to BI embedded in Excel.  Their early GIS was developed from a package we also used: Mapinfo.   Did MS lose the war on location intelligence?
Meanwhile other BI player Tibco Spotfire have acquired Maporama to bolster their geo capabilities.

" ... Microsoft today announced an update to Power BI.  For those who don’t know, Power BI is a set of tools that provide data query, mapping, modeling, and interactive charting usually built on top of Excel. Power Query and Power Map were previously known as Data Explorer and Geoflow, if those names ring a bell. ... "  

Teaching the World to Make Maps

Making Maps.  Another example of specialty MOOC.   " ... Meet the Man Who Wants to Teach the World to Make Maps.  The world’s first digital-mapping MOOC (massive open online course) [ Introduced his course in July ] ... About 30,000 people from all over the world have enrolled so far. The course, called Maps and the Geospatial Revolution, will be taught by Anthony Robinson, a geographer at Penn State. Last weekend, I gave him a call to find out more about the course and the man behind it. ... " 

More about the course in Coursera, where you can add yourself to a watchlist for future editions of this and related courses.

Visualizing Geographic Data

 An interesting HBR Blog case study on visualizing geographic data.  They conclude reasonably: " ... There are lots of ways to sequence development. But the end principle is simple: create more data visualizations than you need to show, because your first idea is unlikely to be your best. Even for this article, we pitched five headlines and synopses to HBR editors. We then wrote five versions of their favorite. So, this article is one of the best of 25 permutations. But is it good enough to change your behavior? ... " 

Tibco Acquires Maporama

I see that Tibco Spotfire has acquired Maporama.   " ... a privately-held, cloud-based provider of location intelligence and geospatial analytics solutions ... " .   They are holding some upcoming webinars on the implications and integration of this capability.  More about this here.

Measuring Advertising

Measurement of outcomes is always interesting to me, so this led to the announcement below:

The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI) and the SEI Center's Future of Advertising Program (SEI FoA) are pleased to announce a conference ( Thursday, May 16, 2013) focusing on new ways to measure advertising effectiveness. This fast-paced, one-day program will feature presentations on research projects that were selected to receive grants from WCAI and SEI FoA last year, along with commentary from a number of well-recognized practitioners. Presentations will cover a wide range of cutting-edge approaches to gauging advertising’s effectiveness including:

Field experiments
Advertising models: going beyond marketing mix and attribution
Combining experimental and non-experimental data
New measurement techniques: eye tracking and emotional response

To encourage a lively discussion on what these cutting-edge findings mean for today’s marketing analytics professionals, the program will feature short research presentations combined with panel discussions. The highlight of the day will be a keynote from Deb Roy, an expert in data-driven methods for analyzing and modeling human linguistic and social behavior, and founder of Bluefin Labs (recently acquired by Twitter).

The full agenda and registration information can be viewed here.

Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative
t: 215-746-4161 | e: wcai-mail@wharton.upenn.edu 
http://wcai.wharton.upenn.edu